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featured content: donna vorreyer & michael noonan

“City Gate” by Michael Noonan


Donna Vorreyer spent 36 years as a public school teacher in the Chicago suburbs. She has published three full-length poetry collections and eight chapbooks, and she hosts an online reading series called “A Hundred Pitchers of Honey.” Learn more at: http://www.donnavorreyer.com

Michael Noonan comes from Halifax (home of the Piece Hall), West Yorkshire, and has a background in retail, food production and office work. Has had artworks published in literary journals in the US and UK. His drawing, “The Pedestrian Centre,” and his painting, “Fun Girl,” for which he has been awarded certificates, were shown at the CityScapes and Figurative art exhibitions, run by the Light, Space and Time online art gallery in America; and can be seen on their youtube videos. He admires the great surrealist artists like Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, and Chirico; and his particular favourite is Yves Tanguy. He likes the visionary, dreamlike and subversive qualities of their work, and his own artworks have a tendency towards the offbeat and the unusual. Learn more at: Michael’s Online Gallery or find him on Twitter/X: @readyverbiage

2024 Curt Johnson Prose Awards

We are excited to announce the judges for our 2024 Curt Johnson Prose Awards. Leslie Jamison will judge nonfiction and Tlotlo Tsamaase will judge Fiction. We are beyond thrilled to have these phenomenal writers judge our 2024 contest. The Curt Johnson Prose Awards will be open March 1 – May 1. For more information check out our contest guidelines here.

Leslie Jamison is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams; the collection of essays Make It ScreamMake It Burn, a finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; and the novel The Gin Closet, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She writes for numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, the New York Times, Harper’s, and the New York Review of Books. She teaches at Columbia University and lives in Brooklyn. Her most recent book, Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, comes out on February 20, 2024.

Tlotlo Tsamaase is a Motswana author (xe/xem/xer or she/her pronouns). Tlotlo’s debut adult novel, Womb City, is out now from Erewhon Books. Tlotlo is a Caine Prize finalist. Xer novella, The Silence of the Wilting Skin, is a 2021 Lambda Literary Award finalist and was shortlisted for a 2021 Nommo Award. Tlotlo has received support from the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative, and xer story “Behind Our Irises” is the joint winner of the Nommo Award for Best Short Story (2021). Tlotlo’s short fiction has appeared in Africa RisenThe Best of World SF Volume 1, Clarkesworld, Terraform, Africanfuturism Anthology, and is forthcoming in Chiral Mad 5 and other publications. Xe is a 2017 Rhysling Award nominee and a 2011 Bessie Head Short Story Award winner. Xe obtained a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Botswana and won an award for design architecture. Tsamaase is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Chapman University.

2024 Marvin Bell Memorial Poetry Prize Winners

We are thrilled to announce the winners of our 2024 poetry prize. A huge congratulations to winners and finalists, and a huge thank you to our judge, Dorianne Laux, and to everyone who entered and shared their work with us. Be on the lookout for our Spring/Summer issue, Vol. 35.1, arriving in May, where the winners and finalists will be published.

Winner — Susanna Lang

“In Your Father’s Garden”

Honorable Mention — Timothy Kelly

“I’ve Got You Under My Skin”

Finalists

bones arched like flowers — Nicole Adabunu

Watching the Horses in First Snow — BJ Buckley

In The End — Anna Elkins

Mannequin — Aiden Heung

Ode to the Smallest Supernova — Elizabeth Hickson

Bullet • Points — Alison Lubar

Jellyfish Season, Chesapeake — William Orem

Ode to the Box of Red Lentil Pasta — Lexi Pelle

“Piel Canela” By Los Panchos Plays in the Janitor’s Headset — Dimitri Reyes

Late October Swim — Ellen Seusy

meet the team: isabelle stillman editor/publisher

featured content: allisa cherry & robin young

Blooming Swan Under Orange Moon by Robin Young

A LIFE / MISLAID
by Allisa Cherry

It began with the smallest things. 
Earring backs and tubes of lipstick. 
Estradiol structures. Dropped 
stitches on salvaged dresses.

Growing in size over time
to all the books I hadn’t finished 
reading and all the annotations 
I’d made in their margins.

Well-worn shirts I liked
to sleep in. All misplaced
in places I’ve since forgotten. 
I watch the sun drop

behind a row of houses
and wonder how little I worry 
about its absence. I enter my room 
and a nameless cat stretches

toward a square of light on the bed. 
My mother, this year, lost to me. 
Being a daughter, gone.
Not like a twig snapping

or a radio switched off,
but an idea as thin as fog
burning off a warming lawn.
My own daughter, I’ve lost her too.

Summer died into fall eighteen times 
and then she slipped over the bridge 
in her silver hatchback. Years ago
I dropped a whole religion. It fell

from my grasp and splintered
to matchsticks on the basement floor. 
Now I carry the bundle
and strike each one by one

to shine a path through the darkness. 
The universe is not where I left it.
I can no longer find it without retracing 
all those pinpricks left by the stars.


Allisa Cherry grew up in a rural religious community in St. John’s, AZ, near the New Mexico border. She teaches workshops for immigrants and refugees transitioning to life in the U.S. and is Associate Poetry Editor for West Trade Review. Follow her on Instagram @allisacherry

Robin Young is an artist and musician based in San Diego. A retired medical assistant turned full-time artist, she creates daily collage masterpieces, often inspired by the likes of Henri Matisse and Salvador Dali, and shares them on Instagram. Not just confined to visual arts, Robin also captivates audiences as a Patsy Cline impersonator, a role she has cherished for over ten years. Learn more about Robin https://alwayspatsy.com or on Instagram @2SongBird

featured content: graphic poetry by tyler barton



Tyler Barton lives in Saranac Lake, NY. His work in this issue is inspired by living with housing insecurity for the past two years, with all the text in his work sourced from news stories in the Adirondack Daily Enterprise about the ongoing local and national housing crisis. 

december spotlight: writer — gary belsky

Gary Belsky, the former editor in chief of ESPN The Magazine, is the president of Elland Road Partners, a media consulting firm, and the New York Times bestselling author of eight books.

december Q&A

december: Tell us a bit about this essay: where did it come from? What does it mean to you? 

Gary: It’s obviously a very personal subject, one that I had intended to write about through a traditional narrative reporting lens. But there were challenges to that, and once I learned that his death was ruled a suicide I decided to look for another way to write about our friend and that time. Eventually, I realized that there wasn’t a truth to be reported but rather my memories to be explored. This piece was not meant to be the official record of our friend’s life and death, nor of our relationship, but rather a reflection of how he and that time lives in my memories. 

december: What’s a standout moment you remember from the process of working on it? A stroke of inspiration, a generative brainstorm, a revision challenge, an a-ha moment, a time you shared it with a reader who loved it? Give us a window into the way this piece came to life. 

Gary: At one point when I was struggling to figure out what to do with the piece I just decided randomly to write it out as a non-rhyming poem. Or something like that, but whatever the case in stanzas. Like a tone poem.  Anyway, I was at work, taking a break, and what I wrote at first didn’t really cohere—it was more a dumping of ideas on the page—but I remember feeling some of the feelings that I wanted to communicate. About memory, about childhood, about loss, about the ways people can affect you throughout your life. So I started tinkering with the structure and eventually found my way to the piece as it stands now. Took a full year, if I’m being honest, revisiting it on and off.

december: This year, we’re celebrating 10 years of publishing december. Can you tell us how literary magazines like december have been important in your literary career? What do you think the importance of the lit mag is to literary culture at large? 

Gary: I think that the act of treating words and sentences and paragraphs and punctuation as sacred—which is what I believe literary magazines do at their essence—is important, from a  societal point of view. I sort of think of literary magazines in the sort of the same way I think of those old scriptoria in monestaries back when writing was the province of the educated elite, e.g., monks and nuns! Literary magazines are keepers of language.

december: What are you working on now? 

Gary: Well, my job, but also a piece about bias in judgment for The New York Times. Quite literally, I mean. It’s about judges and conflict of interest and recusal. I speak and write about judgment and decision making sometimes, ever since publication of the book I co-authored with Tom Gilovich of Cornell, Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes—And How To Correct Them: Lessons from the Life-Chaning Science of Behavioral Economics.

december: What’s something else you love to do or are passionate about outside of writing? 

Gary: Food. I like eating. 

december: Where can people find out more about you?

Twitter/X: @GaryBelsky

Website: garybelsky.com 

Other:www.linkedin.com/in/garybelsky/ & ellandroadpartners.com

december spotlight: poet — christine kwon

Christine Kwon is a Korean American poet and fiction writer. Her debut poetry collection, A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue, won the Cowles Poetry Book Prize (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2023).

She lives in a yellow shotgun house in New Orleans with her partner and their three cats, Trotsky, Lady (Murasaki), and (Cy) Twombly. She is the literary editor at Tilted House Press.

Her work has appeared or is imminent in The Poetry ProjectHot Pink MagJoyland MagazineThe Columbia ReviewCopper Nickel, and The Harvard Advocate.

She attended Yale and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.


Christine Kwon
The Emperor of Rain

For two years father lived in a car
I didn’t call
On Christmas and New Year’s I didn’t call 
When it rained I thought of him
When it was cold I thought and didn’t think 
My mind was a frozen finger
For a long time father was a taxi driver 
Circling JFK LaGuardia and Newark
Old Asian men remind me of my father
I see him between two strands of rain 
Between the rain and the street
Dripping down the window
Father lives in a blue crystal geode
He used to have an interest in fossils
His tie stashed on top of my closet
In Barcelona he bought me a necklace
A cluster of blue flowers
I lost it at a glitter party in college
The next morning I went back and looked 
Only I notice the lime blossoms
That my father’s hair's all white
Walking down the street I avoid
Every outstretched hand

Author Q&A

december: Tell us a bit about this poem: where did it come from? What does it mean to you? 

Christine: This poem is autobiographical. Sometimes it’s difficult for me to put ‘real’ things in poems because it suddenly sounds ‘fake’ when I write about it. But I think this poem somehow captures the tone of my father.

december: What’s a standout moment you remember from the process of working on it? A stroke of inspiration, a generative brainstorm, a revision challenge, an a-ha moment, a time you shared it with a reader who loved it? Give us a window into the way this piece came to life.  

Christine: Most of my poems are born from a phrase. It’s rare that a poem stems from an idea. I think this poem emerged from the mind/frozen finger phrase.

december: This year, we’re celebrating 10 years of publishing december. Can you tell us how literary magazines like december have been important in your literary career? What do you think the importance of the lit mag is to literary culture at large? 

Christine: Lit mags are beautiful objects. I like when they have a point of view and particular taste, rather than being a catch-all. When lit mags have a point of view, readers can come to them the way they go to certain publishers. For instance, I know I like most things that New Directions or Pushkin Press publish. In that way, there are some literary magazines that I go to because I know their taste is the better version of my own.

december: What are you working on now?  

Christine: My second book of poems! My first book, A Ribbon the Most Perfect Blue, came out this year. I am also working on my first collection of short stories.

december: What’s something else you love to do or are passionate about outside of writing?  

I like antiquing, my cats, very small objects, delicate objects, the rain, snow, and my baby, Louis, who was born in October and very beautiful.

december: Where can people find out more about you?

Instagram:  @theschooloflonging

Website: christinekwonwrites.com

december spotlight: poet — shannan mann

Shannan Mann writes poetry, essays, and is currently working on a novel. Her novel is “set across India, Canada, the U.S. and New Zealand. Also, across time. Also, one of the chapters is narrated by a frying pan.” She is a mom to a cricket-loving three year old, and she runs OnlyPoems.net, a beautiful on-line lit mag, with her partner.


shannan mann
ABECEDARIAN FOR K

a
          somewhere between the american and british version
                    almost always the and is hummingbird
          you never truly consider anything
                    as being other from anything else

b 
          you love   babies   books   birds
                    don’t care much for but and because
          you place a blindfold over my eyes     chant kiss   and vanish
                    I’m left     biting the lower lip of breeze

c 
          came a mountain        crowned in lightning
                        called me calf
          come back to bed 	   everywhere you turn	
                    you will find 	   our children

d 
          an abandoned hand
                    darling   dearest   darkburst
          I doubt grace 	 demand passion
                    you with a hand on the doorknob
          open for me

e 
          everything 	          even the rain

f 
          falaq 		          sky 
          furqat 	                  separation 
          you 		          feather 
          your  you	          flame 

g 
          when it comes     to god
                                         you spew the word
          like your spit         on my face       mid-orgasm

h 
	hitchhiker
	how many hours
	will we keep 
                    our thumbs in the air
	forget 	home
	say 	hello 	to here
	
i 
          rare in your poems
          everywhere in your speech

j 
          jupiter		where I built 
                                our first house

k 
          begins your name
          before you step 
          into the silhouette 
          of mine

l 
          you love la lala la lala la in any song
                    wish you were born a musician 
          who could lull hurricanes

m 
          more please
		          always more

n 
          my name	overtaken by n’s
          kneels behind your teeth 
                    white		and a small gap 
                                        to let the light in

o 
          over this vase of snow
          over Ana’s rainbow 
          over my love for you?
          over my dead body 

p 
          you inherited 	 poetry
          from your parents’ piss

q  
          quiet night 
                    sleep with me 
          until sleep arrives 

r 
          rainfall 	   all morning
                       I’ll reach into sun 
          and bloom  you sunflowers 

s 
          you had an ex      whose name you erased 
          called her s       a secret from your mother
          and then found	
	               well       what’s the opposite of ex
          hex 		         next     		      vortex

t 
          taboo	 tryst	trust
                    we 	 trainwrecked
          our way    through this trinity
	  and now            we’re together

u 
          if we reach the end
          please make a u-turn

v 
          we shape words		          into vessels
          to melt in the volcano of culture and colour
          which is to say you often pronounce 
          v as a w and w as a v
          because our mother tongue 
          does not think in double you’s
          but you love evolve 	valley	
          valve 	vulva	 uvula	   so much 
          I echo them back as love

w
          where are you now
          who sleeps beneath your spell tonight

x 
          sexier than an eagle with a rose in its beak

y 
          why	daybreak 
          why 	hope
          why 	plucking stars
          why 	eyes in a mirror
          why 	visa
          why	millions of years
          why 	the slow blue flow of clouds against sun
                        to reveal a body in the wings of the wind
          why 	all night I moan an opera of why’s for you
 
z 
          please whisper 
                    something like zephyr
          so I can finish this poem 
                    which won’t ever finish 
          unless you stop singing

                                        but please don’t


Author Q & A

december: Tell us a bit about this poem: where did it come from? What does it mean to you?

Shannan: This poem was written over the course of several months. I was playing around with the abecedarian but felt it limiting in its constriction of beginning each line with the consecutive letter. The poem began from attempting to deconstruct the form. But in order to do any kind of deconstruction, you need a good reason. And what better reason than love? I was away from Karan (Kapoor), my partner, then. Away like…many oceans away. The long-distance was wearing us down in more than ways than one even though there was (and, I’m happy to tell you, is) so much love. Due to the time difference and our individual responsibilities, we were hardly able to speak to each other for more than a minute or two. So, I began writing to him, for him — and also for the form, beyond the form. Love is contained in many forms that makes sense to the world. Karan’s and my love often didn’t make sense to people. This was my way of understanding something weird and surreal and beautiful and impossible. Categorizing how and who and why I love. 

december: What’s a standout moment you remember from the process of working on it? A stroke of inspiration, a generative brainstorm, a revision challenge, an a-ha moment, a time you shared it with a reader who loved it? Give us a window into the way this piece came to life. 

Shannan: The standout moment was sharing it with Karan. He is also a poet and a very accomplished one at that. He loved it of course, wept also hearing me read it to him. But after the initial emotional and loving reaction, he got his editorial hat on. Karan and I first “met” (digitally) as lovers of poetry. We liked each other’s styles and decided to workshop our poems together. Ever since the beginning, this has been the bedrock of our relationship: our poetry, our work. It’s not so much a specific moment that stands out for me, then, but rather the very weird and beautiful situation itself. The one I love for whom I’ve written the poem is also the first who “critiqued” it and helped me make it a better portrayal of my love by making it a better poem. 

december: This year, we’re celebrating 10 years of publishing december. Can you tell us how literary magazines like december have been important in your literary career? What do you think the importance of the lit mag is to literary culture at large?

Shannan: december is a stunning and carefully crafted magazine with editors that connect with you on a personal, individual level. This is so deeply necessary. Literary magazines are indispensable for writers both beginning to get their feet wet in publishing and those already established and desiring to reach new readers. People sometimes say that “no one reads lit mags” or that “lit mags are dying”. But then how is it that every year there are more lit mags than the last? The truth is that both writers and readers want more places for their work. And they deserve those. december is a shining example of such a befitting place. And I also love the culture of encouraging subscriptions that you unabashedly espouse. Sure, we all can’t afford subscriptions to every single place…but this community engagement, even if for one or two months, allows us to open our world a little wider — something sorely needed in the chaotic condition of things as they are right now. 

december: What are you working on now? 

Shannan: I’m writing a magic-realist horror novel set across India, Canada, the U.S. and New Zealand. Also, across time. Also, one of the chapters is narrated by a frying pan.

december: What’s something else you love to do or are passionate about outside of writing? 

Shannan: Karan and I love watching cricket together. Our daughter, Anasuya (who is 3 now), sometimes joins in with shouts of “catch! catch!” when the ball is clearly going past the boundary. 

Besides this, I’m also really passionate about the lit mag Karan and I have started this year. It’s called ONLY POEMS, and y’all should totally check it out! (onlypoems.net) 

december: Where can people find out more about you?

  1. Instagram: @shannanmania
  2. Twitter/X: @shannanmania
  3. Website: shannanmann.com
  4. Other: onlypoems.net (the litmag I run)
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